One H1 tag Dead Long Live multiple H1 tags?

[Nightwing]

Good afternoon from 9 degrees C mostly cloudy Wetherby UK,

Ive been holding on to the mantra of one h1 tag per page but a developer has challenged me on this by stating you can have multiple h1 tags on the condition the page is HTML 5 & each h1 tag is within its own section or article tag.

So the question is do i need to change my tune?

Thanks in advance,

David

[zigojacko]

It's unlikely that whether a page contains multiple

tags or just one, the effect of that page's performance on this metric alone will be minimal. H1 tags won't have a massive amount of affect and is just one of many hundreds of factors. Whilst with HTML5, multiple

tags is possible, why would you want to anyway? Header tags should be for structuring content in a hierarchy and typically, you would rarely want to have two topics competing for main precedence on the same page.

[My-Favourite-Holiday-Cottages]

In theory google bot can(or will) undersand nested h1's in correct html5 So in the example below:

h1

h1

The latter H1 will be weighted like a H2. This is part of the html5 spec on how it's ment to be interprated if I recall right.

If that applys /now/ I'm not entirely sure.

[irvingw]

Geoff is right, the H1 is for your pages main target, could be seen as keyword stuffing too.